InBerkeley

InBerkeley was out of milk — as per usual — so we went to check out Ashby Marketplace, which has just opened near the corner of Ashby and College in the Elmwood.

First impressions are good. It’s a very nicely designed space — airy, with good lighting and well displayed goods. The emphasis is on healthy, natural food and organic produce. There’s a significant dairy section, fresh produce and baked pastries from the Paris Baker. We leaped to a verdict: it’s Star Grocery meets Market Hall.

Owner Ramiz Hasan (pictured, bottom right) is happy with both comparisons, but says he sees himself as friend rather than competition to both these venerable institutions. This is his family’s 18th store — most are around Haight Ashbury in the city — but it’s the first one he has got to run and he is brimming with ambition for the new venture.

“I have been a Bay Area native for 28 years and I’ve always wanted to own my own store — and I knew I wanted it to be in Berkeley,” he says.

Hasan says he’s bringing in lots of locally produced goodies to his “100% green” shop, such as olive oils and cheeses. He also guarantees that his cheeses cost on average $3 per pound less than at any other independently run vendors in the area — even though he is using many of the same suppliers. “I want to bring my prices down as much as possible and be a real old-school store,” he says

He mentions his niche specialty last: ” I have the largest selection of natural and organic pet supplies among independent stores, possibly in the whole of California,” he says.

Knowing how berserk Berkeley is about dogs, that should make a lot of people very happy.

Business, Food, Green living, Retail, The Elmwood Ashby Markeplace

Berkeley is set to welcome its first mosque with renovations under way at the long neglected building at 2716 Derby Street.

The Berkeley Masjid Foundation (BMF) is committed to establishing a permanent place of worship for the muslim community in Berkeley. There is evidently a need for such a place of worship. As BMF writes on its website:

Berkeley is home to one of the premier educational institutions in the world. Any given year, there are at least 300 Muslim students attending UC Berkeley. These are the best and brightest minds from around the world and represent the future of our ummah both here and abroad.

Despite this notable Muslim presence, there is no established masjid to serve the community. We need your help to change this.

For information about the mosque, including how to support the organization or attend fundraising events, visit the Masjid Foundation’s website.

[Photo: Melissa Rapp.]

Property, Religion, The Elmwood Property, Religion, The Elmwood

Pop-up stores are in — but you knew that already — and a delightful one has just appeared in The Elmwood, taking the front space of the equally delightful Trips Out Travel store.

Designer Donna Allman has amassed a wonderful trove of decorative and useful items over the years and is doing a clear-out. There are delicate packets of Japanese silver leaf, for $10 if memory serves, beautiful buttons, odd rolls of pretty 1950s wallpaper and drawer pulls from $5 to $10.

Picture nails have been one of Allman’s specialties at her business Lilac Bow Yoke.  A decorative button attached to a nail, they were used in Victorian times to hang paintings. Martha Stewart liked them so much she featured two of Allman’s designs in her catalog.

I liked the black and white ones with old-fashioned illustrations of kitchen utensils and clocks.

Allman is a friend of the owner of Trips Out, which by the way has been dispensing travel advice in the same spot for more than 40 years. She will be displaying her wares on Saturdays and Sundays from about noon to 5pm for the foreseeable future (an element of surprise being de rigueur with pop-up stores).

[Photo: www.elmwoodshop.com]

Retail, The Elmwood Donna Allman, Pop-up store, The Elmwood, Trips Out Travel

Vintage Berkeley on College Avenue

If you stop into Vintage Berkeley, the new wine shop on College Avenue near Ashby, and pick up some wine, say from Spain, you can use your receipt to get a discount on that movie you rent from Videots down the street.

In August, that same purchase will get you a cut rate price on a ticket to see the new movie Julie & Julia. A few months ago, it was a discount at Mrs. Dalloway’s bookstore.

It’s all part of an effort among Elmwood merchants to encourage their customers to shop in the neighborhood. “There is a lot of new energy in the Elmwood,” said Ann Leyhe, a co-owner of Mrs. Dalloways. “There are lots of new vendors and we’ve said “Let’s cross-promote.”

The bookstore has taken to displaying books that are linked to the movies being show at the Elmwood Theater. Right now, Food, Inc. is on the marquee and in the window.

On August 7, there will be a neighborhood merchant party to celebrate the opening of Julie & Julia, a new film about Julia Child and Julie Powell,  a New York blogger who cooked her way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The movie will play at the Elmwood Theater. Vintage Berkeley will be serving wine and cheese at a 5 pm reception. And Mrs. Dalloway’s will be at the reception, selling Child’s biography, My Life in France, Powell’s book, Julie & Julia, and the memoir by the editor who first published Childs, The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones.  Child’s cookbooks will be for sale as well.

Liam Reilly and Matt Stevenson sell wine at Vintage Berkeley

Books, Business, Food, The Elmwood

If you live in Berkeley you’ll likely know about publishing heiress Patty Hearst and the fact she was kidnapped from her apartment in the city in 1974. But do you know which house she and her then boyfriend lived in?

There’s a certain frisson to be had from being able to pinpoint the precise location from where she was whisked away by members of the the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 — only to then become a gun-toting, card-carrying member of the Symbionese Liberation Army herself just a short time later.

On a recent neighborhood walk with a friend, we gave ourselves the challenge of identifying the house from which Hearst was taken. Armed with an I-Phone, it wasn’t long before we figured out she lived in the brown-shingle, four-unit building at 2603 Benvenue Avenue (above).

[Photo credit: Hank Donat/www.mistersf.com.]

Celebrity, Property, The Elmwood Celebrity, Property

I’m not sure how many florists the Elmwood can support, but Flower to the People opened today on the corner of College and Russell, in a long-unused kiosk. I hope Flower to the People and the long-established Blooming Alley can coexist happily. At 2pm today the founders of Flower to the People were still smiling, but they admitted that set-up had taken them so long that they had only sold two bunches of flowers so far.

Retail, The Elmwood

Another opening to report. The Dailey Method is opening a studio in Berkeley today in The Elmwood.

The Dailey Method, which promises to get you “longer, leaner, stronger and more fit”, is a group fitness regimen inspired by exercise guru Lotte Berk. This will be the company’s eleventh Bay Area location.

The studio is at 2631B Ashby Avenue, close to College,  in a building that has long been empty, so it will be good to see it occupied. For a while it looked like it would be leased to a large restaurant, but that idea was nixed by concerns over increased traffic and decreased parking opportunities. The Dailey Method website promises “an ample parking lot conveniently located behind the building”.

More information can be found here.

No news yet on the other vacant retail spaces in the same building.

Business, Retail, The Elmwood Business, Retail, The Elmwood

Chipotle, the Mexican grill chain, whose two Berkeley outposts are on Gilman Street and Telegraph Avenue, is sponsoring free screenings of the recently released  Food Inc, Robert Kenner’s movie which promises to “lift the veil on our nation’s food industry”.

Chipotle founder and CEO Steve Ells says: “I hope that all our customers see this film. The more they know about where their food comes from, the more they will appreciate what we do.”

A Berkeley screening is set for  July 15 at 7.30pm at the Elmwood Rialto.

Full info can be found on Chipotle’s website here. (Now I want a burrito.)

[Hat-tip: @amandasberkeley/Twitter.]

Arts, Events, Food, Movies, The Elmwood Events, Food, Movies, The Arts

Oooh. Quintessential British culture direct to my doorstep…

The gorgeous Helen Mirren is coming to my Berkeley neighborhood, along with a fabulous program of live theater beamed straight from the National Theater on London’s South Bank.

First up at the Elmwood Rialto Cinema is the Greek tragedy “Phedre”. Future screenings include “All’s Well that Ends Well”, “Nation”, based on a novel by Terry Pratchett and  “The Habit of Art”, a new play by the incomparable Alan Bennett.

Arts, The Elmwood, Theater Arts, The Elmwood, Theater